Xbox Cloud Gaming could soon let you stream your own games

thesixthaxis.com:

Reports have emerged that Microsoft is planning to start letting gamers stream titles from their own Xbox game libraries starting next month. This would finally fulfil a key part of the Project xCloud plan that been delayed multiple times as the service morphed into Xbox Cloud Gaming as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

The Verge reports that what is known as Project Lapland inside of Microsoft is finally nearing completion. Though this will still go through their standard public testing procedure, starting with Xbox Insiders in November, and gradually broadening to more and more users, and to include more games.

This will come alongside Microsoft’s announced update for the Android Xbox mobile app, which is set to enable game purchases within the app in the US – something Microsoft is able to do after a court ruling this week has forces Google to allow other billing methods in the Play Store on 1st November.

When it was still known as Project xCloud in 2019, Microsoft confirmed their intention to let users start streaming their purchased games in 2020. While Xbox Cloud Gaming itself launched in 2020, purchased streaming was pushed back to 2022… but never materialised. Cloud Gaming has always been restricted to games in the Xbox Game Pass library, and even then isn’t completely universal.

Microsoft took a softly, softly approach to the rollout of Cloud Gaming, starting off with just 50 games, and having limited touch control support for select games. It’s grown a lot since then, so now pretty much every game coming to Game Pass is also available in the cloud. Still, having a curated selection of a few hundred games available for streaming is a big difference to having thousands and thousands of games.

There’s obviously the technical challenge of having all this game data available for all servers, the need to test for compatibility and weed out games that just don’t play well with streaming, but there’s also licensing issues as well. The Verge states that some publishers